‘It’s just a matter of time’: why AI could help Europe create its own Apple or Google : europe

[–] occhineri@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago

Are we talking about the country where a small group of people can enjoy the benefits of working 24 hours a day for a handfull of fancy tech companies all owned and controlled by an even smaller group of people while the rest of the country can't afford to live anywhere else than in their car, doing fentanyl all day? Wow, I really hope, one day, we're gonna have such a big fancy tech company, too!

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The reason why the USA has so many tech gigants and the EU doesn't has nothing to do with talent or market size, but instead everything with low taxes, lax regulations, massive tax breaks and generally the political will to shovel billions into private companies and letting the population pay the bill for it.

Ireland and Malta are the countries most overseas tech companies (and gambling and porn companies) choose as their European seat, not because they have an amazing amount of great skilled talent, but because they have really low taxes and regulations.

Also, the EU really doesn't want companies that are so big and important that they are more powerful than the government.

Lastly, another issue is that the EU, when handing out money to companies, prefers the Airbus model. Instead of concentrating everything into one city, like in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, they like to spread everything out over all of Europe.

None of that is even remotely changed due to AI.

[–] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

low taxes, lax regulations, massive tax break

I call complete and utter bs. If taxes where a reason, Silicon Valley would be on Virgin Islands.

Ireland and Malta are the countries most overseas tech companies (and gambling and porn companies) choose as their European seat, not because they have an amazing amount of great skilled talent, but because they have really low taxes and regulations.

And this proves your view being overly simplistic and unconnected to the real world. They chose to settle their profits in these countries, not their development.

Also, the EU really doesn’t want companies that are so big and important that they are more powerful than the government.

Dude, holy shit. You're confusing the EU with China.

Lastly, another issue is that the EU, when handing out money to companies, prefers the Airbus model. Instead of concentrating everything into one city, like in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, they like to spread everything out over all of Europe.

That's at least an interesting thought but probably neglectable in the bigger picture.

The real reason is, that you need talent and you can attract global talent with the global highest pay. US was rich before, so global talent naturally gravitated towards it. Furthermore and probably foremost, the US were decades ahead of most countries after WWII. It is no suprise that computerization happened there first and that subsequent business models like private operating systems could develop there first, as a very result of that. Everything boils down to the trajectories of the war.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I guess, you are American? In that case, please read up on European history.

[–] eran_morad@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or you could dispute his arguments with, you know, facts.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What arguments? All they said was "Bullshit".

No sources, no arguments, no reason to argue with someone like that. It's like the proverbial chess match against a pigeon.

[–] eran_morad@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

He literally argued against your conjecture. This is his comment.

low taxes, lax regulations, massive tax break

I call complete and utter bs. If taxes were a reason, Silicon Valley would be on Virgin Islands.

Ireland and Malta are the countries most overseas tech companies (and gambling and porn companies) choose as their European seat, not because they have an amazing amount of great skilled talent, but because they have really low taxes and regulations.

And this proves your view being overly simplistic and unconnected to the real world. They chose to settle their profits in these countries, not their development.

Also, the EU really doesn’t want companies that are so big and important that they are more powerful than the government.

Dude, holy shit. You're confusing the EU with China.

Lastly, another issue is that the EU, when handing out money to companies, prefers the Airbus model. Instead of concentrating everything into one city, like in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, they like to spread everything out over all of Europe.

That's at least an interesting thought but probably neglectable in the bigger picture.

The real reason is, that you need talent and you can attract global talent with the global highest pay. US was rich before, so global talent naturally gravitated towards it. Furthermore and probably foremost, the US were decades ahead of most countries after WWII. It is no suprise that computerization happened there first and that subsequent business models like private operating systems could develop there first, as a very result of that. Everything boils down to the trajectories of the war.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ok, lets do this then:

I call complete and utter bs. If taxes were a reason, Silicon Valley would be on Virgin Islands.

This is a totally idiotic argument. My point was US vs EU, not vs some tiny backwater country with a population that fits within a small city district.

Of course you need talent and infrastructure, but both the EU and the US have that. The differentiating factor is tax and regulations.

And this proves your view being overly simplistic and unconnected to the real world. They chose to settle their profits in these countries, not their development.

Again, a totally idiotic argument. If that person had any knowledge about how IT companies operate, they would know, that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and almost all other tech gigants have quite big development offices in all of Europe too. But they put their head quarters where tax and regulations are nice for them.

The real reason is, that you need talent and you can attract global talent with the global highest pay. US was rich before, so global talent naturally gravitated towards it. Furthermore and probably foremost, the US were decades ahead of most countries after WWII. It is no suprise that computerization happened there first and that subsequent business models like private operating systems could develop there first, as a very result of that. Everything boils down to the trajectories of the war.

Total bullshit from start to finish.

If this was the case, then Europe would, for example not have the massive automotive, pharma, aviation or chemical industry, and we wouldn't have the only company worldwide that is currently able to buld the machines that can create the most high tech chips (ASML).

Also, that guy probably doesn't know that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and many others where founded over 50 years after WWII. Even Microsoft and Apple were founded 30 years after WWII.

Computarization didn't happen in the US first, it happened at the same time in the USA, Europe and Japan.

Successful computer manufacturers in the 50s where (among others) IBM, Burroughs and GE from the USA, but also Siemens, Zuse, Bull, Elliott and dozens other companies from Europe and Fujitsu, Oki Electronic and NEC from Japan.

[–] eran_morad@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Fuck’s sake, the transistor, semiconductor, and all of the computer industry was developed in the United States starting in the late 40’s. All that shit came out of Bell Labs. I don’t have the energy to interact with you any further.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago

All of the computer industry? So Zuse, Siemens, Fujitsu and all of them just never existet? And apparently neither did IBM?

You are delusinal.

Also, the Transistor was invented Julius Lilienfeld who was born in modern-day Ukraine while he lived in Germany.

The semiconductor was invented by the German Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1847.

Next you are going to tell me that Pizza, too, was invented in the USA.

Dude, making up shit doesn't make it any truer.

[–] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

What arguments? All they said was “Bullshit”.

You just claimed something to be true without even making an effort to explain, why you think it should be true. This is not a valid thing to do, not only but particularly if you want to abstract the whole world away, ignore all social, economic and historic reasons, why things are like they are, to boil everything down on "tax laws". Even trickle down economics is more rooted in reality than this utter bullshit. In contrast, I presented a reasonable and nuanced explanation that even brought two different aspects to the table instead of trying to force the whole world into a monocausal and - no offense - mind bogglingly stupid explanation.

That is not all. I could even disprove your claim easily, but you say, I was the one without the arguments. You are the pigeon, my boy.

[–] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

As if you did not already had proven the unbelievable delusion of your world view in manyfold ways, you're once again completely on the wrong track. I'm European and an one actively participating in European civic society, as well. So, it's even safe to say, that I know quite a lot more than the average European regarding European history and European affairs in general.

[–] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would like to add that foss is very strong in europe as well.

Due to our ambitions in being privacy respective and libertarian for our software the communities thrived.

[–] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I wish the commission would know this instead of sabotaging privacy all the time. Because I firmly believe that Europe only has a prosperous future when it fills the vacuum of soft power that the rampage going US left after 9/11. Being a safe haven for dissidents, cryptography and open source technology is the way to go imho. Europe can't compete financially with US or China, but it can be a place where innovaters come to realise their visions while having huge quality of life.

[–] Turun@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Europe arguably already has created very successful AI powered products. It's not Apple level yet, but there is no denying the success.

Already quite old, but still better than most, if not all, alternatives is deepl.com to translate text. I very much prefer them over google translate, their results are just plain better.
LAION, which you may have heard of already due to their LAION-5B dataset is an organization that provides a set of images together with their captions to be used as training data. Googles imagen was trained on that for example.
It's a German non profit organization, the product is freely available for everyone.
Also in the realm of text to image AI is stable diffusion. Arguably the best text to image model for actual art, due to the widely available additions that allow fine-tuning of the results. Midjourney makes esthetically pleasing images and DALL-E can do text now. But there is simply no other text to image model that can produce a landscape view with exactly this or that shape. Or a portrait of exactly this person.
Stable diffusion is free and open source and provided for everyone free of charge. It was developed in Germany.

A lack of hyper capitalism makes these companies fail in the metrics usually used to determine success, but that doesn't mean they are unsuccessful or unimportant.

Europe

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